Wusakile MP canes ‘greedy’ Mopani
By VIOLET TEMBO THE Forum for Democracy and Development (FDD) on the Copperbelt has threatened to sue the Attorney General over the suspension of 31 Ndola City Council officials including the Town Clerk by the by Local Government Service Commission (LGSC) recently
FDD provincial spokesperson Anthony Chibuye claimed yesterday that the suspensions of the past Town Clerk Ernest Sumani and 31 top officers was ill timed. He said said the situation has since affected service delivery in the city.
Mr Chibuye said the FDD was alive to the fact that the council had many challenges but he was convinced that the LGSC would have carried out its routine action in phases and not the way it did.
“The commission has made a bad decision but it does not mean the decision it made is final because it can be challenged, and I want to tell the commission that we will challenge this decision on behalf of the Zambian people and on behalf of council officials whose families are now suffering,” said Mr Chibuye
Mr Chibuye alleged that there were people from higher offices who were championing confusion at the local authority and benefitted from the activity.
He charged that plots in the district had attracted a lot of interests that was breeding the conflicts between cartels within the system. “We have evidence of Lusaka residents that have been awarded plots in Dola Hill under a plan approved by the Ministry of Lands in Lusaka and yet the council officers now are being used as sacrificial lambs,” he said.
Mr. Chibuye said that he had evidence of some plots which were not given by Ndola City Council but orders came from Lusaka.
But LGSC chairperson Amos Musonda dismissed the claims and charged that FDD was just politicking. He said the commission was only carrying out its mandate and action taken did not affect any political office.
Mr Musonda advised FDD to deal with political matters as the issue at Ndola council was administrative. By ROGERS KALERO
IT is corporate greed of the worst order for Mopani Copper Mines (MCM) to refuse to pay the cost reflective tax on electricity and threaten to retrench miners when copper prices at the international market were doing much better, Wusakile Member of Parliament Pavyuma Kalobo has said.
Mr Kalobo has since urged Government and the mineworkers’ unions to engage the management at Mopani to find a lasting solution.
He was reacting to the pending retrenchment of more than 4,000 miners at MCM and the termination of contracts of more than 300 suppliers and contractors following the stand-off between the MCM and the Copperbelt Energy Corporation (CEC) after the latter introduced cost reflective power tariff.
Mr Kalobo said MCM should not sacrifice innocent miners, contractors and suppliers because of its failure to negotiate the power supply agreement with the power company.
“We have allowed these mines to get away with corporate greed, but it is time the government and the trade unions put on the gloves and fight corporate greed in the mining sector,
“Allowing corporate greed to go unabated would be tantamount to taking bread from the poor man’s mouth.” he aid
Mr Kalobo said the whole purpose of opening up the Zambian economy to private competition was to attract investment in the hope that the economy grew and Zambians would be lifted out of poverty.
He said it was surprising that after sacrificing over 30,000 jobs in the mines during privatisation in 1991, the private owners of the mines went ahead and retrenched another 10,000 jobs in 2015 when copper prices fell to below USS4, 000 coupled with a power crisis.
“Currently, when copper prices have risen to nearly US$7,000 a tonne on the international market, we are disappointed that MCM is planning to retrench another 4,700 miners in reaction to the new cost effective electricity tariffs being implemented by CEC and ZESCO,” Mr Kalobo said
He said it was unacceptable for multi-national mining giants to be causing unemployment when it was a well-known fact that they were reaping super profits from mining activities.